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we mature?”
    â€œAren’t we though?” I grinned at him. “No, it—it feels good actually. I think. We’ve made the next step in parenting. This is what we’re supposed to do, right?”
    He sighed. “So I hear,” he said. “Never thought it would be this hard though. How you doing on Ada?”
    I shrugged. “Meghan told me a little more about her last night. I don’t know. They’re young. Chances are Marshall is going to move on to someone else soon anyway. I suppose I’m getting worked up for nothing. What do you think? Do you think this is love? Temporary?”
    â€œWho knows. You’ve always been closer to him than I have. I’ve tried talking to him about girls a few times before, but it always devolved into our same old thing.”
    â€œArguing religion.”
    â€œYeah. I don’t know. Maybe it is love. Or maybe he just thinks it is.”
    â€œIs there a difference?”
    Cal looked at me in surprise. “Well, yes, there’s a difference. Damn, Chloe. That’s pretty cynical.”
    I turned away from him, tears suddenly pricking my eyes. The tears didn’t feel cynical. Had I turned cynical? And if I had, why was it a surprise to my husband? The same reason that Ada’s appearance in our lives was a surprise to me, I supposed. I was too sure I knew Marshall.
    I had touched every inch of his skin, wiped and cleaned and inspected places I had never, would never, touch on Cal. I thought I knew Marshall so well that it shocked and nearly confused me to consider hair anywhere on his body but his head. It was the great conceit of motherhood perhaps, that my having birthed, fed, and bathed him gave me never-ending access to his psyche.
    Meghan had not pulled away from me yet. Had she? How long had it been since I had seen my daughter naked? Unselfconscious without clothing? And why did allowing them to grow up seem exhilarating until anything sexual came into the picture?
    The surprises of motherhood seemed dubious gifts, at best. And the stages—I could no longer call them surprises—of marriage not only seemed dubious but . . . dangerous. A slick, long-grassed slope of dulled emotion, and yes, perhaps even cynicism.
    And I cannot deny that the fact that it was a surprise to my husband was both depressing and yet oddly satisfying. I knew he wasn’t paying attention. And didn’t that just prove it?
    I wandered over to Cal’s workbench and picked up a wrench. It must have been twenty years old, its shank no longer shiny but lustrous. I tapped it against the side of the bench and then turned back to Cal with it in my hand, enjoying the slightly unbalanced weight of it.
    â€œThink you could fix that screen door today?” I asked.
    â€œI’ll try to get to it,” he replied, gazing at me steadily.
    I nodded and, tossing the wrench onto the bench with a clatter, left for my workroom.
    Where I got little to nothing done. After the energy and noise of the previous night, the house now seemed too quiet, too still to support creativity. I mixed a green to replace some paint loss on a palm tree, but couldn’t get the right shade. My black wasn’t even, not usually a problem in the frequently less technically correct Highwaymen paintings, but this was a Harold Newton, and the man had known what he was doing with color.
    I finally turned to the other Highwayman I was working on, a “fire sky,” filled with brilliant reds and yellows, almost absurdly lurid to anyone unused to southwest Florida’s sunsets. I’d seen plenty of sunsets to rival the fire sky painting, and this time I got my colors right and was finally able to lose myself in my work. By the time I was ready for lunch, I’d worked my shoulders into satisfying knots and managed to replace my irritation with Cal with more pleasant remembrances of the previous night.
    This, too, was one of those stages of marriage that